TrueNAS Takes A Leap With Fangtooth
On Tuesday April 15th 2025, iX Systems will release the newest version of TrueNAS (now labeled Community Edition not Scale) 25.04 Fangtooth. Fangtooth should have been a minor upgrade in the lifecycle since 24.10 Electric Eel was a huge deal for finally allowing Docker back onto the bare metal and allowing users to simply paste Docker Compose files right into the UI.
However, Fangtooth is swinging for the fences by incorporating Incus into the OS. I had never heard of Incus before this, but I will tell you, this is a welcome change. Not only can I run docker on TrueNAS now, but Incus brings in the ability to do LXCs similar to Proxmox as well as better VM management.
I have been testing with the beta RC release, and I will tell you - this is amazing. Launching an LXC from a list of containers is faster than I ever would have expected. To get Ubuntu 24.04 up and running took 5 mouse clicks and launching it was almost instantaneous. I mean like less than 5 seconds to go from clicking the button to being in the shell. Ridiculous.
An interesting project which has popped up for LXCs is Incus Helper Scripts. This is a clone of the Community Scripts page for Proxmox but made for TN. It works in the same way in that you find a script you want to run, run it in the TN shell, and it creates a pre-made LXC for you. For Proxmox, Community Scripts has been a Godsend, but as of now Incus Helper Scripts is still buggy for TN. If the maintainer gets it going well, its going to be a big deal.
Virtual Machines work in a very similar fashion, where I can select an image from a list populated by linuxcontainer.org. I also have the old options of using my own ISO or using a zvol from a different VM. Sidenote - getting old zvols to work from 24.10 is not always possible so upgraders beware. I do wish VM management looked more like the gold standard of Proxmox, as TN does not give me nearly enough customization or really any options at all for VM creation/management.
VMs are going the way of the dinosaur in my opinion anyway. There is almost nothing I need a full-on VM for these days. I do everything in containers, be it docker or LXC. And for that this is so so good. I have found that Incus can let me pass directories from the host directly into the container using this:
sudo incus config device add <container-name> mydataset disk source=/mnt/tank/pbs path=/backupIt looks like a long command but basically I run this in the TN shell and specify a container name, a dataset name, a path on the host and a mount path inside the LXC and I'm done. Doing this with Proxmox Backup Server, I saw speed increases of 10x as compared to mounting an NFS share.
While I do not think this is going to be the end of Proxmox, I really like that for those of us with a single server, LXCs in TrueNAS as a huge leap forward in containerization. In just one year on TrueNAS we went from being stuck with k3s and putting docker in VMs to being able to run docker on bare metal and being able to launch LXCs almost instantly. Respect.
There are many more features with the new release like a new kernel and other enterprise-grade things, but I do want to mention something else. In July, there will be the added ability to use specific IPs assigned to docker containers. For example, if I am running Nextcloud on my server, whose IP is 192.168.1.5, Nextcloud would run on 192.168.1.5:8080. However, in the future, I will be able to specify and give Nextcloud its own IP on my subnet like 192.168.1.21. This means I can have two docker containers running on TN on port 8080 without conflict since I can give one of the containers a different IP than the host. I don't see myself doing this, but the community has been pushing pretty hard for it and iX Systems listened.
A big THANK YOU to iX and all the people who put major work into this release. I am so thrilled and I love the direction the project is going. If it continues in this direction at this pace, TrueNAS will become the dominant OS for servers in the near future.